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Mono Working Close With Microsoft, Gets $12M USD

07-24-2012, 11:00 AM

Phoronix: Mono Working Close With Microsoft, Gets $12M USD

Xamarin, the company behind the controversial Mono software platform that was born by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman when the Mono developers got let go from Novell, has announced a series-A financing round worth twelve million USD. They're also continuing to work closely with Microsoft...

Comment

Yes, because when it (mono) first came out there were a lot of suspicions about motives. Microsoft have often used dubious practices. The fear was that once people had invested time/money/effort, MS would pull the rug out from under them.

Even after the various assurances from MS, there were still grey areas. The two outstanding problems I'm still aware from my reading when it first blew up are:

There are significant sections that are not reimplementable, (i.e. the DRM stuff, and the GUI stuff I think)
This makes the cross-platform claims rather ridiculous!

The Community Promise was ambiguous about future versions
If I remember correctly they promised not to attack with patents against the current version, but there was no assurance about subsequent versions.

Comment

Yes, because when it (mono) first came out there were a lot of suspicions about motives. Microsoft have often used dubious practices. The fear was that once people had invested time/money/effort, MS would pull the rug out from under them.

Even after the various assurances from MS, there were still grey areas. The two outstanding problems I'm still aware from my reading when it first blew up are:

There are significant sections that are not reimplementable, (i.e. the DRM stuff, and the GUI stuff I think)
This makes the cross-platform claims rather ridiculous!

The Community Promise was ambiguous about future versions
If I remember correctly they promised not to attack with patents against the current version, but there was no assurance about subsequent versions.

Not sure about DRM stuff (or where in the .NET spec there is DRM stuff; could be there but I haven't come across it), but the GUI stuff works pretty well. The look and feel isn't identical because gtk is used instead, and iirc it wasn't part of the specs MS opened up, however our internal gui apps written in .NET run flawlessly on linux with mono.

What doesn't work is of course any native code, com interfaces, and shell commands. For that you need wine.

Comment

Not sure about DRM stuff (or where in the .NET spec there is DRM stuff; could be there but I haven't come across it), but the GUI stuff works pretty well. The look and feel isn't identical because gtk is used instead, and iirc it wasn't part of the specs MS opened up, however our internal gui apps written in .NET run flawlessly on linux with mono.

What doesn't work is of course any native code, com interfaces, and shell commands. For that you need wine.

Ah bugger! I got mixed up with the Silverlight/Moonlight. That's where the DRM cack is (or rather isn't) which is why Linux can't access Netflix and friends.

Regarding the GUI stuff: Point being that if you target mono (as opposed to .NET) as well as the look and feel differences, there are sections you can't use because as you say the specs for those components are not opened up.

And actually the Wikipedia page on mono covers the outstanding uncertainties quite well.